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T he market and the public grew in tandem during the colonial era, generating the tension between liberal rights and republican virtue that shaped Anglo-American debate in the revolutionary era. In protesting Britain’s new imperial regulations imposed after the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), American patriots invoked a liberal vision of the emerging market society alongside civic republican warnings about the corrupting influence of commerce. The new regulations violated the liberal rights of life, liberty, and property. But they also gave rise to republican fears of a British conspiracy to corrupt American virtue, ensnare the colonies in an economic system that produced extremes of luxury and misery, and replace liberty with slavery. Colonists resolved to “forego the elegancies and luxuries of life” if that proved the only means of protecting their liberty. Writing in 1773, “A Consistent Patriot” warned that when “the importation is connected with the ruin of government, . . . when it is designed for that purpose and will infallibly have that effect, we ought to consider and treat it as we would THE PLAGUE.”1 As they expanded outward from Britain, the market and the public took more democratic form in the colonies. The availability of land led American patriots to hope they might avoid the economic inequality and political corruption they saw threatening liberty in England. Even before the Revolution, the wider distribution of property encouraged broader participation in public affairs. Consumer boycotts and other revolutionary actions then brought new voices into politics, as did the struggles over the new constitutions and the foreign and domestic policies of the new republic. By the 1790s, new commercial opportunities encouraged independent farmers and urban artisans to abandon the traditional republican suspicion of commerce. Engaged in what Benjamin CHAPTER 1 Democratizing the Republican Ideal of Citizenship B Virtue, Interests, and the Citizen-Proprietor in the Revolutionary Era 10 • CIVIC ASPIRATIONS AND MARKET DEVELOPMENT Franklin called “the necessary and useful kinds” of trades, small proprietors proclaimed themselves the most virtuous of citizens.2 The American Revolution thus democratized the republican ideal of citizenship . Before the Revolution, a small elite claimed exclusive possession of civic virtue, insisting that only those aloof from the daily struggle for existence could perceive and pursue the public good. That view did not survive the Revolution. During the Pennsylvania Assembly’s debate over the rechartering of the Bank of North America in 1786, backcountry legislator William Findley refused to allow merchant Robert Morris and other directors of the bank to pose as disinterested gentlemen. Advocates of recharter, Findley charged, “feel interested in it personally, and therefore by promoting it they were acting as judges in their own cause.” Findley wished not to discredit self-interest, but to expose the false pose of disinterestedness and to assert the right of small proprietors to pursue their interests too. “Any others in their situation,” Findley concluded, should “do as they did.”3 Findley’s defense of self-interest did not preclude seeing small proprietors as more virtuous than idle aristocrats. Small proprietors claimed that their common sense and limited wants, their habits of honesty and frugality, their thorough acquaintance with the needs and abilities of the people and the productive capacity of the country made them the most competent and virtuous citizens. During the Constitutional ratification debates, New York City’s leading Antifederalist insisted that small proprietors “are more temperate, of better morals and less ambition than the great.” They “have less temptation,” Melancton Smith continued, “they are inclined by habit and the company with which they associate, to set bounds to their passions and appetites.” When “the interest of this part of the community is pursued,” he concluded, “the public good is pursued .” Smith later helped create New York City’s Democratic Society in 1794, one of many city-based political clubs that identified the virtues and the interests of urban artisans and mechanics with the health of the republic.4 Seaport Cities: Crucibles of Market and Public As crucibles of market and public, colonial seaports first experienced the tension between economic interest and civic aspiration that shaped the age of revolution. As centers of commerce, the seaports required more intensive government to police the boundary between individual right and public good. As the focus of British policy and the locus of British officialdom, they tested the extent of imperial power and the limits of popular protest. Their dense populations and crowded streets, taverns and churches, public buildings and print shops made the seaports the centers of political...

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